Linux distro/desktop competition

[gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org (Jerry Feldman)]

No reason to inject reality here :-)

On Fri, 17 Aug 2007 19:00:57
John Chambers <jc-8FIgwK2HfyJMuWfdjsoA/w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Actually, historians have thoroughly debunked the "Mussolini made the
> trains run on time" myth.  During his tenure, the Italians trains had
> an atrociously bad on-time record. And, more generally, they've shown
> that  dictatorships  (including  those  in  corporations)  tend to be
> rather inefficient.  The main reason  is  that  the  decision  makers
> rarely  understand  (or  care  about)  the  low-level issues, and the
> people who do are afraid to speak  up  or  take  actions  to  improve
> problem situations.  If you want efficiency, you give the people with
> expertise the power to make and implement their  own  decisions,  and
> the  power  structure  must  support  those decisions.  This tends to
> happen automatically in democracies and other decentralized  systems,
> which is why they are usually more efficient.
>=20
> We even have a special case of this within the linux community,  with
> the  Gentoo  and  Slackware distros generally producing somewhat more
> efficient systems than the others. The reasons are fairly obvious and
> well  known:  It  takes a bit of expertise and labor to install those
> distros.  And the efficiency gains are small enough that  it  can  be
> worthwhile  to  save  human  time  by just going with one of the more
> packaged distros.  This goes along with the frequent observation that
> it takes work to maintain a democratic political system.


--=20
Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9